7/09/2017

Headline July 09, 2017/ ''' BANGALORE'S -BREWED- BOOMERANGS '''

''' BANGALORE'S -BREWED-

BOOMERANGS '''

ENGINEERED TO EMINENCE : the students of the world, feverishly,
but surely, in very small and tiny incremental steps, think Elections
and Voting.

Yes! Under the auspices of the great
students of America, [all so, in the fullness of time], say, the
beginning of next year : Elections, Votes and Votings,

The
Students, Professors and Teachers of the United States of America have
been requested and asked by !WOW! to take a look inside their
imaginations, so as to allow all the other students of the world, to
expand their own.

THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY -most lovingly called, !WOW! -is the exclusive ownership of every single student in the world.

Just
as it is the exclusive ownership of every single student of India :
One -share-Piece-Peace. So What Lies Beneath let's get to read and
understand.

WHEN TITANS OF THE TECH INDUSTRY......................

like IBM and Sun Microsystems began drifting into Bangalore in the 1990s, the city's geography had been very much part of the allure.

Sitting
atop a series of ridges, Bangalore lies more than 3,000 feet above sea
level -an elevation that affords the city month after month of
moderate temperatures, nippy evenings, and clement afternoons.

But
this topography also permits Bangalore's 33 inches of annual rain to
flow instantly downhill. Hauling water from the nearest major river
-the Cauvery, 53 miles to the south -*is a formidable and inefficient affair*.

For
generations Bangalore stood out for its foresight in devising ways to
manage its water. The founder of the city, a 16th century chieftain
named KempeGowda, dug the first of the city's lakes, to trap and hold rain water.

Subsequent
kings and then the British dug more, so that a census in 1986 counted
389 lakes, spread like pock marks across the face of Bangalore.

As
early as 1895, Bangalore deployed steam engines to pull out water from
its reservoirs; a decade later, it became the first Indian city to use
electric pumps. In the 1930s, the first water meters were in India were
installed here.

When the IT industry
exploded, though, the planning seemed to seize up. Or perhaps it simply
couldn't keep pace. In 2004 it was a trip to Bangalore that inspired
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's wide eyed epiphany that ''
the world is flat.''

The city -having raced
from obscurity to compete handily with American tech hubs -became
Friedman's go to mascot for globalization in over drive. The
question of stressed-resources, however, rarely factored into
Friedman's columns, and it seemed to figure only casually in the
city's own calculus.

Roads and tech parks were
permitted to encroach onto lake land; industries dumped chemicals and
debris into water bodies. The most vivid image associated with Bangalore
today is not of its software engineers arrayed neatly within the
cubicles but of its largest lake, Bellandur.

The runoff of its toxic chemicals into Bellandur
is so dire that, periodically, the lake catches fire. Dense clouds of
Taupe smoke lift off the water and sail towards the condominiums of Iblur or toward the IT offices of Sarjapur Road.

Neglect,
not surprisingly, gave rise to scarcity -and then collided with its
volatility of climate change. The water tankers embody the market's
brawny, uncouth response to *Bangalore's Public Failure*.

But they have also reinforced the dysfunction of the old machine, says R.K. Misra,
who sits on a government task force to improve Bangalore's
infrastructure.''No illegal business can run without the patronage of
the politicians and the police.'' he says.

Misra
deploys the word Mafia easily when talking about the tanker barons.
The business bears several of the hallmarks of organized crime, he
says: unlicensed operations, occasional violence, and collusion with
political networks.

Politicians up and down
the ladder, from municipal officials to state legislators, receive
payoffs. ''The tanker mafia funds their campaign during elections.'' Misra says. As a result, ''there has not been a concerted effort to contain the water tanker mafia.''

The Day After Thayappa Stood Me Up, I returned Iblur and called him again.

''Why don't you come tomorrow at noon?'' he said. Obediently, I went back once more, reclaimed my stone bench between the fish stall and the tea shop, and waited. Thayappa drove up on his motorcycle, a silver-gray Riyal Enfield Bullet that shone in the sun.

Introduced myself and pointed in the direction of the old village, where he lived. ''Maybe we could go your house to talk?''

He
was reluctant. ''Let's just stay here,'' he said. We walked into the
shadow of a tarp roof over a coconut stall. The coconut vendor,
recognizing Thayappa, got up from his own chair, dusted it off, and offered it to him.

Thayappa,
a middle-aged man with hairline in retreat, wore a lemon-yellow shirt
and gray polyester trousers. He had on glasses with brown photochromic lenses; in the shade, these were caught midway in a muddiness between opacity and clarity.

His
right eye-lid, I could just make out, was swollen, as if from an inset
bite. He had a mustache, a faint sheen of white stubble on his chin, and
an aura of a cool, taciturn authority, even when he was being flexible
with the truth.

At one point, Thayappa,
said he was getting out of the water business altogether and that he
now ran just one tanker; then he said his fleet had shrunk from four
tankers to two; then he said he owned two small tankers and a large one.

Back in the day, all this was agricultural land. Thayappa said, his arm describing an expansive arc around him. There was nostalgia in his voice. Iblur had been a village of farmers, and Thayappa's family a locally prominent one.

Then Bangalore swallowed the village whole. Thayappa was one of the first of Iblur
entrepreneurs to enter the water tanker business in 2003 or 2004,
when the condos around the village, filled with new residents began to
exhaust their wells.

''There were once 20 bore wells in the village,'' Thayappa said. Now there ore only five that still work. So Thayappa sens his fleet out farther afield to find water.

When the conversation turned to the details of his business, Thayappa grew guarded and evasive.

I
recounted the story that the woman in the complex had told me, and I
asked if he forced clients to buy a minimum number of tankers leads
every day. He did nothing of the sort, he said. I wondered if there were
battles over the turf, fights over customers. ''What fights?'' he said.
''With whom would we fight?''

I asked if he had an understanding with the other tanker owners in Iblur -if they set prices in unison. He denied this too.

''A
person can only eat however much he's able to eat,'' he said
cryptically. ''If I want to eat everything -well, how's that
possible?''

''They call this tanker business a mafia,'' I said.

''But
if there's no running water, what will all these people do?'' he said.
''You can say what you want about the mafia, but people need water to
drink.''

And Bangalore was growing more parched by the day, Thayappa said.

''This
summer, the temperature got up to 40 degrees Celsius [104 degrees
Fahrenheit], which has never happened here, in all these many decades.

They're
closing all the lakes up and building over them. '' He swept his arm
across the horizon again, but this time the gesture suggested not
nostalgia but imminent defeat.

''Where will the
city possibly find water for all these people? In two or three years
we'll run out, and then all these apartments will be empty. They'll
have to vacate and leave.''

With respectful
dedication to the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the
world. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society and
Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011: